Monday, August 12th

Monday, August 12th. Day 55

Today's miles = 21.7 Total CDT miles = 845.2

Last night Baboon and I gave the trail name 'Raffle' to Dan because of his winning the grand prize of a grill at the gas stations customer appreciation raffle in Sawtelle. He accepted the name and is now Raffle. Baboon, Raffle, and I sat around this morning eating breakfast and getting out things ready for the 10.8 mile hike to Old Faithful Village. As usual, when I know there is mint chocolate ice cream awaiting me, I hiked quickly and got to the tourist town of Yellowstone around 11:30. The first 8 or so miles were trail and the remainder was boardwalk swarming with tourists. They were all looking at the geysers and taking pictures. After a few moments thats exactly what I started doing. I especially liked the ones which had cerulean blue boiling water in them. It seemed that Baboon and I had impeccable timing today because right as we went by certain geysers (that only go off every so often) they would errupt. We passed a few huge geysers that just happen to be erupting right as we walked by. All in all (minus the swarms of tourists) it was a pretty cool experience. We hung out around Old Faithful Village for about 5 hours this afternoon getting lunch, picking up packages at the post office, and getting our permit for camping in Yellowstone. While getting our permit the lady told us that the only available camp spot for tonight was 13 miles away from the village. We had already hiked almost 11 and spent 5 hours in "town" and she was telling us that we had to hike another 13 miles!! Baboon and I both knew that by the time we left it would be around 5pm and the chances of making it 13 miles was unlikely. But we accepted it because if all the campsites are full...they're full. It wasn't long into hiking that we began to pass campsites. The first few had people at them. All the rest did not. This is when Monkey and I began to get angry. I had specifically asked the lady if there was any place closer that we could camp. She replied with a firm "no". Ten out of the maybe 13 or 14 sites we passed were empty. After a while we decided to just camp at one of the open spots and in the event that a ranger comes by we would explain our situation (that we didn't want to night hike in grizzly land) hoping he would understand. But then we had some doubt. I began to think that there might have been a reason we were not assigned to those spots; perhaps bear activity there. So Baboon and I chose to hike on to a spot where there was already people and stealth camp around there. Well, the next few campsites didn't have people at them either and we both began to get a strange feeling. We saw HUGE grizzly prints in the sand by a lake and ended up night hiking almost 2 miles to the next spot. There was a tent there. So, we tried to be as quite as possible in setting our things up for the night. By the time I was in my sleeping bag it was past 11pm and I was exhausted!! The second my head hit my sleeping pad I was out for the night.